This reading provides an overview of Tableau and how you can start using it to build visual charts for data analytics.

Overview

The Tableau platform is a leading analytics platform that supports efficient visual data analytics, data storytelling and interactive dashboards with live updates.

There are three versions of Tableau available for you to use including Tableau Prep Builder, Tableau Desktop and Tableau Cloud. However, for this course you must use the Desktop version.

You can download the desktop version on your machine from the following link:

All the steps and technical requirements for installing Tableau on your machine are listed on the Tableau website in the following link:

There are also many free videos available on the Tableau website to help you get started:

Getting Started with Tableau

Tableau is used to analyze data and provide answers to different questions about business performance. However, before you can start analyzing data you need to connect Tableau to your data sources. Let’s take a few minutes to review Tableau and the process steps for creating visualizations of your data.

Opening Tableau and exploring the UI

Launch Tableau to view the start page and the related options.

Here is an overview of the Tableau UI as shown above:

Open: Open workbooks. A Tableau workbook is a collection of different types of sheets such as worksheets, dashboards and stories.

Accelerators: Provides sample workbooks.

Discover: Offers access to useful learning resources like video tutorials, forums and blogs.

Tableau logo icon: Used to switch between the start page and the authoring workspace.

Connect pane: Used to connect to data within different data sources. There are several types of files and servers that you can connect to from the Connect section such as Microsoft Excel, Spatial files, MySQL and much more.

Visualizing your data

As you’re aware, Tableau is used to visualize data. There are many ways in which you can visualize your data in Tableau including:

Let’s review the steps for creating these different chart types.

Creating a bar chart

To start analyzing the Global Super Store data, select Microsoft Excel. Navigate to the data source in your computer and select the Global Super Store file.

This action loads the file data into the Tableau Data pane, which contains information about all orders placed with Global Super Store including products, sales, customers and shipping data.

Now you need to create a bar chart that shows overall sales across all categories of products. You can then explore your results and determine how to improve sales. Select the worksheet tab to begin performing data analysis and create a visualization of Global Super Store’s data.

This action redirects you to the worksheet authoring space.

Within this authoring space, you can drag and drop relevant dimensions and measures fields directly into the canvas area.

You can move data to the cards area, or to the column and row in the shelves section.

To complete your task, drag the category option into the column shelf and the sales option into the row shelf. This creates a bar chart with relevant information.

You can also make some changes to the chart’s appearance to make it more visually engaging:

Create a trend chart

You have now created a bar chart that shows sales for all categories. Next, you need to build a new view in which you can review profits trends by category over the past several years. A trend chart is best suited to this task. Carry out the following steps to complete this task:

Creating a map chart

Your next task is to explore Global Super Store’s sales and profits in Africa and determine in which countries the company is performing best. You can use a map chart to complete this task. Carry out the following steps to complete this task:

You now have several different types of charts that you can use to identify sales trends and paradigms. Global Super Store can use these charts to compare their sales data and make business decisions.

Conclusion

The Tableau platform provides you with advanced data analytics tools that support efficient visual data analytics, data storytelling and interactive dashboards. Having completed this reading, you should now be familiar with the Tableau workspace and the process steps for creating visual charts for data analysis. In the rest of this lesson, you’ll learn more about data preparation and the development of interactive dashboards.